Glass Cannon
by Tsar Bomba
Summary: Clara contemplates a storm. Missy/Clara


Standing outside, leaning against her porch railing, Clara had the premonition that something strange was about to happen.

There was no real reason for this notion. The sky was a mute, uniform grey, pale and featureless, the noon-darkness cast over the world perhaps melancholy and stymying but not threatening. There was no discernible movement of the stand of pine and some other trees she didn't know the name of with red leaves that sat overlooking her home in the near distance, so no wind. Beyond the horizon the sky faded to a darker grey, the hills and woodlands muddled. The world was eerily quiet, she couldn't even hear the passing of cars or televisions playing in neighboring homes. There was just a constant, low sort of hum in her unnerving solitude, the kind that leaves one waiting for an unknown conclusion, for the noise to break. Perhaps that was the reason but she couldn't be sure. All she understood was that in spite of all she'd seen in the universe, that few things could equal the strange phenomenon of a silent earth, so still that it seemed like time itself had been paused.

It was as if someone heard her thoughts and answered an unknown, maybe unasked for wish for the cessation of her nervous discomfort. A gentle breeze picked up out of nowhere, a current that drifted over her lawn and lightly blew her hair about. She turned her eyes to the trees. The tops were swaying carefully, dancing back and forth. She could hear the rustling of their leaves. She watched as a few broke free and fluttered away, carried off by the wind. Charcoal clouds had formed out of nowhere and hung ominously at the edge of the horizon, dappling the somber heavens, the border between the light sky and the dark sky a stark division. Then she smelled rain, and heard the absolute faintest rumbling of very distant, very weak thunder. Her heart started to beat a little bit faster and she drummed her fingers against the wooden railing.

Something about thunderstorms made Clara want to smoke a cigarette. She'd never smoked much before. Maybe she'd bum a cigarette off a friend, when she was younger, but she'd never made a habit of it. Then the air became sweet and heavy with rain, and smelled faintly of ozone, the way space did just inside the atmosphere, and the clouds came in oppressive and total, cancelling out the sky, and the wind would pick up and distant, sourceless sheets of lightning would flare over the edges of the trees black under the darkness and all she'd think about is how she'd like to smoke a cigarette on her porch and watch the storm come in.

Clara loved storms. She always had. Not in a careless way either. They still made her a little nervous. Her heart would race after a particularly harsh clash of thunder. She'd jump at every flash. They were powerful and unpredictable, and as time passed with the Doctor Clara had become more and more attuned to her affinity for danger, and in turn loved and feared them more and more. Standing there, watching it form itself out of nothing at the edge of the word, like it had willed itself into existance, she'd already worried the skin along the edge of her thumbnail, unconsciously picking at it with her teeth. It was red and a little torn and sore. She pressed on it with her index finger and pushed the blood away and then watched the color come back.

She fished around in her jacket pockets. She found two halves of a lemon drop, cleaved cleanly down the middle where it had been smashed at some point in her pocket. She had no idea how long they had been in there. It wasn't a cigarette but it gave her mouth something to work on other than her fingernail. She took one half and put it in her mouth and sucked on it, making a point to not bite down.

The wind was picking up. The power lines swung about and the thinner limbs on some of the trees wavered back and forth, scarlet leaves making a ripping noise as they rippled against each other. Aside from random gusts and the occasional faint thunder, it was very quiet.

Clara felt Missy before she saw her. She was behind her, leaning up against her doorframe, wearing a predictable expression: a little bored, a little careless, a little amused. Clara didn't have to turn around to know what she looked like. She realized that Missy's appearance was the "something strange" that Clara had anticipated, the way a dog can feel an impending earthquake or a coming storm. Clara's shoulders twitched up as a loud cackle of thunder rolled over them, bleeding into Missy's laughter. "Scared?"

"No," Clara said, a little too quickly. The storm was moving faster than she'd expected. She smelled smoke through the damp air. She turned around. It felt a little dangerous putting her back to the storm, but it felt more dangerous keeping her back towards the Mistress.

Missy was smoking a thin cigar, but she didn't know how to hold it and it was poised between her fingers like one would hold a cigarette. This small error didn't matter much though. She painted an elegant picture in her black suit and skirt, muted by the greyness of the world, all burgundy lips and pale skin and dark nails and black hair and the faint haze of smoke that drifted near her only briefly before the wind carried it off. Missy's lips quirked into a sardonic smile at Clara's expression. A wayward curl fell over her cheek. "Admit it, you're a little scared."

Clara crossed her arms over her chest. These unexpected intrusions had been occurring with such frequency as of late that they could hardly still be called unexpected. Missy showed up often, albeit briefly, and her sole purpose seemed to be emotional torment. Clara had given herself away at Skaro, in the blush in her chest, in the quickness of her pulse, when Missy shoved her against the wall of the Dalek sewer and pressed herself against her, smelling like lavender and vaguely of ashes, like crushed, dry petals, her skin cold to the touch. It was a shameful attraction that Missy had never directly mentioned, she had more finesse than that, but she knew how to exploit it.

"I'm not scared," Clara said, lying again. Missy smirked and took a long drag off the cigar, opening her mouth and letting the smoke billow out on its own. She looked like a dragon. Clara unconsciously picked at her thumb.

What she felt about Missy was how she felt about storms: they made her nervous, they shouldn't be underestimated, they had the potential for horrible, heartbreaking destruction, but they were also very beautiful and in a way fragile. They were glass cannons, just as likely to obliterate themselves as they were to obliterate something else. The English teacher that was Clara Oswald couldn't ignore the symmetry of a good metaphor, as much as she wished to deny it.

She turned back around, Missy's unseen presence behind her making her skin itch and the hairs at the back of her neck stand up. The air felt electric and Clara wasn't sure if it was because of the storm or because of her. She bit down on the lemon drop, sighing at herself at her lack of willpower as she crunched it down and swallowed. Another whiff of smoke. She took the other half and put it in her mouth.

The sky was faintly purple now, ochre and navy and angry, like a bruise. The clouds swirled about and raced across the horizon. The thunder was growing louder and the lightning streaking more frequently, the time between the two narrowing every minute. Clara was gripping one of the porch frames. Missy had moved to stand next to her and was now tapping the lit end of her cigar against Clara's railing, destructive in her boredom, not holding it there long enough to extinguish it but long enough to leave black and orange burn circles. She tapped out a straight line, then a heart, then a skull with perfect artistry. Like child playing with fire. A several thousand year old child that has lived long enough to know better but refuses to. Clara focused on her hands, the fire tamed at her long fingers, and the war they were waging with her porch. She thought of something Paul Valéry had once written in a letter:

"I am brutal, but I have, or did have, a mania for precision."

The damage was minimal, Clara needed to paint the porch anyway and she supposed that this was infinitely better than Missy randomly murdering passersby, even though right now they looked and felt to be the last two people on earth, but nonetheless she tried and failed to snatch the cigar from Missy's fingers.

"Rude," Missy said, giving Clara a look as she finally dropped the cigar and crushed it under the heel of her boot. It was clear she'd only done what she'd done to elicit some kind of reaction. Any kind of reaction. Clara pointlessly rubbed at the burn marks with her finger. "You show up uninvited, destroy my porch for no reason, and I'm the rude one?"

Missy smirked but didn't look at her, watching the autumn storm with clear disinterest. Rain was falling on Clara's street now but hadn't met her lawn yet. Clara studied her profile, the sweeping angles of her face, her proud, strong nose, the tilt of her lips, and then drew a hand up to trace her own round cheek, her lines more sloping, more gentle. They were an oddly complementary couple of people, she thought.

"I'm bored," Missy said, those two words usually enough to raise a red flag. They were dangerous words. Missy was an unlikeable, cruel person when she was bored. Clara though was caught up in the weather, in a boom of thunder that corresponded with a web of lightning that skittered across the furious sky, and her response came before she could mediate it. "Then go," she said over the rain. It was smattering her porch now. "No one asked you to be here."

Missy lifted a brow, her face and eyes immediately bellicose. Clara looked away, contrite. Just because she'd tired of denying her weird attraction to what was essentially a violent, genocidal, ruthless space God didn't mean that she had any plans to throw herself at the Mistress's feet, but it also didn't mean she had any business picking a fight with her. She felt, rather than saw, Missy edge closer. She felt her breath in her ear, or maybe that was just the wind. Gusts were screaming over them now. The sky was very dark. Clara couldn't see Missy's face even if she wanted, only catching glimpses in the flashes of light. Clara felt her heart pounding in her ribcage. She really wanted that cigarette.

"What a disgrace," Missy murmured, her eyes on the clouds, her close enough that didn't have to yell over the percussion sounds of the sky. Clara felt her smirk against her ear. "This storm is a drag. Let's go see us a real one."

"What?" Clara said, her objection lost in a wave of wind as Missy grabbed her wrist and tore them away, sucking up into the vortex, spinning and spinning. Those brief seconds as they were ripped through time, no matter how many times she did it, always terrified her more than any storm could. She lost her footing immediately at their arrival, falling hard on her ass. She'd grabbed for Missy but she'd already stepped away, elegantly, turning on her heel to stare down at Clara with a self-satisfied grin on her face. "Don't take me down with you, you clumsy girl," she said cruelly, her pale eyes delighted.

Clara thought she might throw up. She shut her eyes and allowed herself a few more moments on the ground. It was cool and smooth. Metallic. She listened to Missy's voice. She was humming something. Space Oddity.

"You have to stop doing that," Clara sputtered, holding her stomach. She looked around. Missy's TARDIS, if she had to guess. Dark and muted and quiet and surprisingly spartan. Unlived in. She doubted that Missy spent much time in it. Missy loomed over her, very close. She held a hand out. Clara got up without it and Missy rolled her eyes. "You can't complain about falling down and then refuse help in getting up. Doesn't make a lick of sense."

Clara bit back a retort. There was no point reasoning with this woman. Missy did see the defiance in her eyes though and smiled. "You'll like this. Come here."

Missy's TARDIS had no windows, so Clara wasn't sure what to expect when she flung the doors open but it enough to fill her with terror and nearly make her scream. "Oh my god."

She tried to force herself back inside but she fell against Missy, who grabbed her and held her there, right at the edge of the TARDIS and the hellscape beneath them. She was going to push her. She was going to push her in. "Let me go. Let me go."

Missy grabbed on tighter, a long hand wrapped around her bicep in a vice grip and the other around Clara's waist. She moved the hand on her arm around the front of her shoulders. "If I let you go you'll go tumbling right down into that, you silly girl. It'll tear you to pieces. Be still."

Clara froze. Her eyes locked down at what was beneath them. It looked like the mouth to hell, or the eye. A great, gaping, swirling maw spinning furiously, red and orange and black and blue, spinning and spinning. An angry inferno of color. She was terrified but she couldn't look away. "What is that? Where are we?"

"Jupiter," Missy said, peering over Clara's shoulder, trying to catch her expression. "Thought I'd show you a real storm."

Clara stared down at it, the entire span of her vision consumed by the storm, though calling it one almost demeaned it. The scope was incredible, panoramic and total, huge, bright scarlet clouds swirling like great globs of paint into the maelstrom, like oil and water, only to be sucked in and spat back out, like there was some irate seabeast shrouded in the Jovian current devouring the atmosphere around the planet. They were hanging in empty space right above it, so close that Clara couldn't see any blackness. Missy must have silenced the area around the TARDIS, because Clara heard nothing except her own heartbeat and her breathing, the endless cycle of destruction below was entirely quiet. No doubt that at full force, at this distance, the roar of the storm would deafen them, but it was a strange, lonely quiet.

"Incredible, isn't it," Missy whispered, as if she didn't want to break the silence. Clara nodded, unable to find words. Human words couldn't do something like this justice.

Missy laid her head on Clara's shoulder. Clara glanced at her, lit up by the intensity of the storm, the colors playing across her features, her eyes reflecting it in twin pools. A vast difference from the muted, faded colored woman she'd been on earth. She looked proud, oddly satisfied, like the storm was her creation, like she'd summoned it up from the depths like a witch for this purpose. Maybe she had, it wouldn't have surprised Clara. She leaned her cheek into Missy's own cool one and they watched in silence. Clara had been wrong to compare her to a lousy earth storm, she realized. Those storms are ultimately rarely dangerous. They're incredible and beautiful for their duration and then forgetten in golden beams of post-rain sunlight. Missy was the red eye. She was the Great Red Spot, undying, unrelenting, driven on by a rage she'd long forgotten the purpose for, but ultimately trapped in her own orbit. Clara had a strange thought then, regarding the Mistress's sudden appearances, with her holding her there right at the edge and with the power and will to shove her over but not the inclination to do so, that perhaps even storms get lonely.


End file.
